Anna Muzychuk Through To Semifinals As Humpy Koneru Blunders Piece
GM Anna Muzychuk reached the semifinals of the 2022-2023 FIDE Women's Candidates Tournament after winning her tiebreak match vs. GM Humpy Koneru on Sunday. After three draws, the Indian grandmaster blundered a full piece and quickly resigned.
Muzychuk will now face GM Lei Tingjie in the semifinals. The match starts on Tuesday, November 1, at 7 a.m. PT / 15:00 CEST.
You can watch the 2022-2023 FIDE Women's Candidates Tournament on our Twitch channel. Games from the event can be viewed on our events page.
Anna Muzychuk, the older of the sisters from Ukraine, started Sunday's tiebreak with a psychological advantage. She had been down a point after three classical games, and in the fourth, Koneru had been one move away from drawing.
Despite the tension, the first two games (another Petroff and another Semi-Tarrasch) were relatively quiet draws where no big mistakes were made. The third game was quite different: a rollercoaster where first Muzychuk was winning, then Koneru could have gained a big advantage, then Muzychuk was winning again before she allowed a perpetual.
This game is an intense battle with many moments for readers who want to practice calculation or simply appreciate the beauty of tactical complications in chess.
After this fantastic battle, the tiebreak came to a sudden, premature end when Koneru blundered a full piece in the opening of game four. A heart-breaking moment, and the match deserved a better decisive game, but sometimes this is how it goes.
Monday is a rest day. The Lei-Muzychuk semifinals match starts on Tuesday, with Muzychuk playing with the white pieces, which was determined in a drawing of lots that took place right after the tiebreak had ended.
The 2022-23 Women's Candidates Tournament is an elite event featuring eight top female players, who compete in a knockout format for a share of the €250,000 prize fund and the right to play in the Women's World Championship match against Women's World Champion Ju Wenjun. The tournament's first quarterfinals began on October 25; the final will be in the first quarter of 2023. The time control is 90 minutes for the first 40 moves, followed by 30 minutes for the rest of the game with an increment of 30 seconds per move starting from move one. A draw offer before move 40 is not allowed.
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Peter Doggers joined a chess club a month before turning 15 and still plays for it. He used to be an active tournament player and holds two IM norms. Peter has a Master of Arts degree in Dutch Language & Literature. He briefly worked at New in Chess, then as a Dutch teacher and then in a project for improving safety and security in Amsterdam schools. Between 2007 and 2013 Peter was running ChessVibes, a major source for chess news and videos acquired by Chess.com in October 2013. As our Director News & Events, Peter writes many of our news reports. In the summer of 2022, The Guardian’s Leonard Barden described him as “widely regarded as the world’s best chess journalist.”
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